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Illinois Bar Exam Results: How To Break Down Your Score

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Illinois bar examIllinois Bar Exam Results: How To Break Down Your Score

Note on 12/2/2020: we will update this post shortly but please check out this post on how to interpret your Uniform Bar Exam score report in the meantime!

Illinois bar exam results came out September 29, 2017. The Illinois bar exam score report is confusing for some people, so in this post, we break down how to interpret your score, using percentiles released by the Illinois Board of Admissions to the Bar. Then, we’ll let you know what percentile you needed to score in in order to pass, for both the multiple choice (MBE) and essay portion (MEE).

Illinois Bar Exam Results: How To Break Down Your Score

 Illinois bar exam

Chart courtesy of the Illinois Board of Admissions to the Bar: https://www.ilbaradmissions.org/july2017-percentile-equivalent-charts

1. What do percentiles tell us?

Percentiles are provided to let you know, roughly, how you scored when compared to other takers. So, if you scored in the 54th percentile, that means you score better than 53% of people who took the exam. Illinois breaks its published percentiles down into an MBE portion and an MEE portion. At this time, they have not provided percentiles for the Illinois essay exam (IEE) or the Multistate Performance Test (MPT). They’ve just released the average amount of points. So, using the chart above, if you scored above a 6.47 on the MPT, you scored above average in comparison to the other who sat for the exam.

2. What score do you need to pass the Illinois bar exam?

Illinois requires a passing score of 266 on the MBE and MEE. This does not require a 133 in each section, but rather a combined score. So if you scored a 142 on the MBE, you would only need a 124 on the MEE to pass. When we do our analysis below, we will assume you scored equally well on the MBE and MEE.

3. Percentile-wise, what MBE and MEE score did I need to pass the July 2017 Illinois bar exam?

On the chart above, you’ll see that the Illinois Board of Admissions to the Bar gave percentiles on scores in 5 point increments. So, on the MBE, you needed to roughly score between  a 130 and 135. This means that you only needed to score somewhere between the 25th and 36th percentile to pass. Similarly, on the MEE, you needed to score somewhere between the 25th and 34th percentile to pass. So, in order to pass the Illinois bar exam, you did not need to score better than about 25-34% of people who took it!

Please note, however, that Illinois has not full adopted the UBE. They still also administer the Illinois Essay Exam, which is worth 20% of your overall score. As mentioned above, they do not, however, release percentiles for that portion of the bar exam, nor for the MPT they administer.

If you want more help dissecting your Illinois bar exam score report, see this post.

If you failed the Illinois bar exam and you are looking for a new approach, see this post.

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